Advocacy Groups Protest Senate Donor-Disclosure Proposal

Nine advocacy groups and public-policy centers from across the political spectrum have asked U.S. Senate leaders to quash an effort to require nonprofit groups that file ethics complaints against U.S. senators to disclose their major contributors.

“This proposal is a clear attempt to intimidate the public from seeking enforcement of Senate ethics rules,” the groups wrote in a letter this month to Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky.

The letter refers to an amendment that has been drafted by Sen. John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, to the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, S. 223, a bill that would require senators to file campaign-finance reports electronically.

Senator Ensign’s amendment would require charities, religious organizations, and civic groups that file ethics complaints to disclose their “substantial contributors“—described as people who have contributed more than $5,000, if that amount is more than 2 percent of the total contributions received by the organization during a specified time period.

“We need to protect individual senators from purely politically motivated ethics complaints that come against us that sometimes we will have to run up legal bills and all kinds of other things,” Senator Ensign said on the Senate floor. “If it is done purely for partisan reasons, we need to know that, and transparency is the best way to do it.”

But the advocacy groups say the amendment violates the “letter and spirit of well-established tax law policies, rules and regulations protecting the identity of donors” that have been backed by the U.S. Supreme Court. “Current law provides adequate information about any organization filing an ethics complaint,” their letter says, adding that senators can request copies of a nonprofit group’s IRS Form 990, which provides information about its leaders, finances, and activities.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate Rules Committee, last week wrote a letter to Senator Ensign asking him to withdraw his amendment. Citing “ideologically diverse public opposition” to his proposal, she said the issue should be considered separately at a hearing by the Rules Committee.

Tory Mazzola, Senator Ensign’s spokesman, said the amendment aims simply to make the ethics-complaint process more open. “This would apply to both Democrats and Republicans,” he said. “It’s about fairness.”

The groups that signed the letter are the Alliance for Justice, Americans for the Preservation of Liberty, the American Conservative Union, the James Madison Center for Free Speech, the Center for Lobbying in the Public Interest, the Free Speech Coalition, Gun Owners of America, the National Center for Public Policy Research, and OMB Watch.